[split] Sanity -- from the Humanities Zoo thread

[rowens]

Learning is important, and I'll always be learning things whether I try to or not, and the things I know and have learned are still there.

But some mornings, many mornings, I wake up, and imagine I've just arrived on an alien planet, and nothing I've known before matters.

I just throw away all the wise sayings and all the laws and rules about what's real and what's to be done and what's not to be done. And I only follow my own conscience. And morality and that sort of thing starts to arise like instinct, from my race memories of the fabricated society I was in the day before. And I work from that. And I have a deep instinctual need to be moral and decent to people that need help. I mean, I push it all back, into unconsciousness, and let it seep out naturally.

The fact is, I'm conscious of a lot of the normally unconscious causes of my problems. That's why I can control them. And I can try to replace them with more positive symptoms.

Yet I have to snap out of my alien world, and abide by the fabricated society if I want to be with people. And I have to react like people do, to what people say and do. I have to be emotional, and I am. I'm an alien; then I explode back into being a man. And men and women are, by their natures, emotional idiots. Even if it's through showing lack of emotions.

I am an emotional idiot.

But if I wasn't, I wouldn't be human.